Some questions get asked repeatedly. When this happens, they may not get answered as
fully or as well as they did before. Repeated questions are a waste of time and bandwidth for
everyone. This is an attempt at providing high-quality answers for frequently asked
questions.

LUGOD stands for "The Linux Users' Group of Davis". Note the placement of the apostrophe. We are, as our name
implies, a Linux users' group: a bunch of people who use Linux. LUGOD provides a means for us to support each other with
technical know-how and also to provide a cool social network.

We are quite proud of LUGOD. People who come into contact with us like Dave Anderson (seti@home), Jeremy Allison
(Samba), Rick Moen (linuxmafia.com), Chris DiBona (VA Software), and many others all say that LUGOD is the most active and
prolific LUG they've ever seen. We do lots of stuff: support, social, evangelism. Why do we do it? Because it's fun!
LUGOD started out as a purely social group. We're a bit too big for that anymore, but the social element is still an
important aspect of everything we do.

Formally, LUGOD is a 501(c)7 non-profit club. It is supported entirely by volunteers and donations (not
tax-deductable, alas). We have a constitution and a set
of bylaws. Membership is free, though you do not need to join to participate.

The mission of LUGOD is provide services, technical assistance and a social network to the local Linux using
community. Every penny that LUGOD makes goes to fulfilling this mission and nothing else. We're financially
responsible, but what we do sometimes take money.

Some donations go to expanding our lending library. We don't purchase many books because we get so many book
donations, but sometimes there will be a book that people want and really ought to be in our library which has no chance
of getting donated. A book on learning LaTeX is a perfect example.

We don't normally provide food at the meetings, but for special meetings, where the guest speaker is special, we
like to have some kind of food and beverage at the meeting to help celebrate the event. The food you see at the average
meeting has been donated by some kind soul.

Part of our mission is to hold monthly installfests. The people run the installfest give up an entire day (10:00am to 6:00pm) once a month for every month
of a year. And it can be a very difficult job! These people are the heroes of LUGOD; without them, we couldn't have
installfests. As a way of saying "thank you" to the installers, we provide them with pizza for lunch. We don't feed the
attendees (we couldn't possibly pay for all of them), but they can donate money to the installfest fund and share in the
pizza. We usually have around 10 installers each month. That can be a little pricey.

LUGOD is constantly holding public Linux demonstrations, classes, info sessions and
speaking events. The money required for making copies of our pamphlets and handouts can really add up.

We constantly advertise since part of our mission is to get people to use Linux and attend our events. We don't
usually pay for advertising since we don't usually have the funds for it. However, for really special events we will
sometimes take an ad out in a newspaper like the Comic News Press.

When we first started, we considered being a registered UC Davis club. This would've
given us a lot of money each year and certain perks like being able to register rooms in UCD
for events.

Unfortunately, the price was too high. As a campus group, there are no restrictions on
who could be a member, but officers have to be registered UCD students. We didn't want our
non-student membership to be 2nd class citizens by not being elegible for officership. So we
chose not to be associated with UCD.

It has been asked, "Why not become a campus club and just not tell UCD that your officers
are not UCD students". We could've done that, and chances are that nobody would know the
difference, or more importantly, care. We wanted to be honest. Imagine that!

When we outgrew Steve's Pizza, we began to look for a new meeting place. The city of
Davis has many perfect meeting rooms, but they are very costly to rent. We applied for a
waiver of room fees but the Davis City council turned us down. They would rather have let
our group die than give us a room for free that wasn't being used in the first place. So, no,
we're not affiliated with the city of Davis, either.

We've all been there. You go somewhere and everyone knows each other, except for you. You don't know who to talk
to and it's uncomfortable until you eventually make some friends. But some of us make friends faster than others. How
do you speed up the process?

Firstly, have the webmaster (currently Bill Kendrick) take a picture
of you at our meeting for our members page. This will allow other people to associate your name with your face so we can
say hi to you at the meeting and know whom we're greeting.

Secondly, sign up for the mailing lists and interact with us. We
can't expect to know someone without interacting with them. The mailing lists provide an excellent forum to interact and
get to know you.

Thirdly, the single most important thing you can do to make friends quickly at LUGOD is to volunteer for something.
We have plenty of things you can volunteer for. We're always looking for people to staff
our monthly installfests and Linux demonstrations. LUGOD always has something in the works: classes... talks... booths at
events... tons of stuff. We always need people to help staff these things. You don't need to be technically inclined
either. We always need people to just "be there" to pass material out, field general LUGOD questions and direct traffic.
By volunteering at events, your name is almost guaranteed to be remembered by the people at the event. Bringing food like
chips and salsa to a few consecutive meetings is guaranteed to make you an extremely popular person.

Joel Baumert: Arranged for us to get some
excellent meeting space at Z-World.

Z-World: Even though we don't meet at Z-World anymore, it would be hard to
overstate how kind Z-World has been to us. Jim Riffel, Joel Baumert and Z-World has donated so much to LUGOD that I'm not
sure how we'd ever pay them back.

It's not as easy as it sounds; if you think asking a question is trivial, you probably don't really know how to ask
a good question. Asking for help involves 4 things:

The symptom: "My system does X".

When does X happen: "My system does X when I do Y

The output: "My system does X when I do Y. The output is Z"

Relevent entries in your system log.

So in other words, this question:

My computer hangs. What could be causing this?

is much better asked as this question:

After my computer is on for a few hours, the system doesn't respond to the mouse or
keyboard. The monitor is blank, and the only way I can recover from this is by hitting
the reset button. I looked in /var/log/messages, but the last few entries just say
"MARK" (what does that mean?). I'm running Suse 7.3 with a 2.4.2 kernel. I can
successfully log into the computer remotely from my system at work when this happens.

One of the myths propagated by Microsoft is that nobody is around to help you when you have trouble with a Linux
system. I admit, there's a problem with Linux support, but it's quite the opposite. At times, there's TOO MUCH support.
Linux support is free and available 24/7. Linux support doesn't end with documentation---it starts there. LUGOD is
available for help, as are countless websites, other LUG's, Usenet, Google and more.

Before asking a question on vox-tech, check out the vox-tech archives to see if anyone has asked it before:

http://www.lugod.org/mailinglists/search

Also, do a search on Google groups. Most questions that get asked on vox-tech have been asked and answered hundreds
of times on a Usenet newsgroup. Google groups is the #1 best source of info about Linux.

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search

Next, for more verbose discussions about various topics, you can consult a HOWTO. The collection of HOWTO's is ever
increasing and they're a good way to learn a topic which may not be covered by a book. You can probably find the HOWTO's
on your system in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO.

If you don't see them then you should definitely install them from your Linux installation disk. Every distro
carries the HOWTO's in various formats like text, postscript and html. If you don't know how to do this or don't have
Linux installation CD's you can download the HOWTO's from The Linux Documentation Project:

http://www.tldp.org

They also have FAQ's, Guides and books at linuxdoc. Familiarize yourself with what's there, at least once, and the
next time you need to know something about, say firewalling, you'll remember there were a few relevent sounding documents
at www.tldp.org about firewalling. By the way, there is an excellent Linux FAQ at linuxdoc.org. Even seasoned Linux
veterans can learn from it:

http://www.linuxdoc.org/FAQ/Linux-FAQ/index.html

Don't forget the man pages. Learn what man -k does. Don't forget the info pages. If you don't
know how to use info pages, do info info, then press h. It's a 10 minute info page
tutorial, and is worth every minute.

Sometimes you have a quick question and don't want to wade through all the information out there to get the answer.
This is called wanting to be spoonfed. Sometimes we just don't have the mental strength to hunt down the answer to every
small question we have. That's OK. Just don't make a habit out of it.

This has been kicked around on the mailing lists every now and then. I believe the first time this topic surfaced
was only a few months after the mailing lists started, when LUGOD was a fledgling LUG. The short answer is that nobody
has any time. I certainly don't.